Chapter 15
fifteen
PHOEBE
Zoe texted me Friday night to tell me not to watch it, which is how I found out what it even was.
My father had gone upstairs after Colby was asleep. I sat on the end of the bed in the room I grew up in with the laptop on my knees and I watched my husband’s face come up on a screen.
Honestly? He looked terrible. He’d shaved, which he does when he’s frightened.
“You’ve written about it,” the interviewer began. “So let’s start there. What did you write?”
“I wrote that my wife retiring at thirty-four was a mistake.” No hedge, no runway. He went straight at it. “That’s what I said… and I’m not going to soften them for you, because I didn’t soften them on the page where I wrote them.”
“And she read it.”
“She read it before I ever had the courage to say any of it to her face.” A pause, and I watched him take it. “Having the opinion was one thing, but being too cowardly to admit it to the one person I should’ve told is where I really screwed up.”
I brought my hand up over my mouth, leaning in closer toward the screen.
“I spent two years grieving something that wasn’t mine to grieve,” he said. “She didn’t lose anything. I lost something. I sat in a box for years watching the best athlete of her generation, and I somehow came away thinking my desk was the serious business in the house.”
His voice cracked. I know that crack. I’ve heard it in a hospital corridor and I’ve heard it in a car after his grandfather’s funeral, and it was real.
Then he leaned forward and I felt the room change through a laptop speaker.
“There’s something I haven’t said.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
Troy nodded his head, not looking right at the interviewer, but somewhere past them.
“Ellis offered me a film. It’s a pretty big production.
Eleven months, Budapest and Vancouver, mainly.
I’ve wanted to work with him since I was a kid.
” He looked at his hands. “I called him this morning and told him no.”
“Did you really?”
“Look, this isn’t a stunt and it isn’t penance…”
It was both, if you asked me.
“…I’ve just had a very bad look at what I actually think is important, and I’d like to spend some time not being a man who thinks his work is what matters most.”
The interviewer let it sit. Of course she did. It was magnificent television.
I closed the laptop and I sat there in the dark, letting it all wash over me, one turbulent wave at a time.
The phone starting to going off on the nightstand, blinking with each notification until it just stayed lit.
As if I hadn’t been punished enough, by Saturday I was the woman who’d cost Troy Newman the role of his career.
First, I was a woman whose husband had said something cruel about her, and by lunchtime I was a woman who’d extracted a public sacrifice from a good man who was clearly trying, and I hadn’t said one single word in either direction.
He did that in an hour, in a chair, with his voice cracking. Maybe he didn’t mean to. That’s not even the worst part.
The worst part is that he never asked me. He never even bothered to tell me about the role to begin with!
He decided what my career was worth in a book, and then he decided what his career was worth on television, and he screwed them both up in one single night.
Edwardo came for dinner on the Tuesday because my father invited him, which I found out only when the doorbell went off.
He brought too much food and a bottle of wine my father wouldn’t drink and a stuffed rabbit for Colby that was frankly enormous, and Dad shook his hand on the step for slightly too long.
Here’s what I hadn’t planned for. They liked each other.
They sat at my father’s kitchen table for hours and argued about a match from before I was born.
Dad called a player Edwardo admires a coward, and Edwardo called Dad a dinosaur, and both of them enjoyed it to the point of giddiness.
Edwardo held my son while he ate, badly, one-handed, and Colby took hold of a very expensive shirt and pulled and Edwardo said something to him in Spanish that made my father laugh into his glass.
Nobody mentioned the interview. Nobody mentioned Troy. It was the best evening I’d had in a month and I resented every minute of it.
Then Dad took Colby upstairs and it was the two of us at the table with the plates, and Edwardo put his napkin down.
“Walk me to my car,” he said.
It was warm out and the street was empty and the photographers had thinned out to one, parked far enough down that he’d have needed a better lens.
Edwardo leaned against his rental and folded his arms.
“I am going to say something and then I am going to drive away,” he said, “and you will not have to do anything about it tonight.”
“I don’t know where you’re going with this…”
“You will let me have this. I have waited a very long time and I have earned a minute of your evening.”
So I let him have it.
“Come with me,” he said. “After the match. Not as a comeback and not as a scandal. Bring the boy. Bring the nanny, bring your father, bring the whole circus. I will put you in a house wherever you want to be and I will not ask you for anything you do not offer me.”
Well, he certainly knew how to get right to the point. “You’re being serious.”
“I have been serious since we were fifteen and you beat me on a clay court in Portugal and did not even look pleased about it.” He said it without any performance at all.
“I know that you are married. I am not confused about that part. I have been in love with you for most of my life and I have never made it your problem. But I am making it your problem now, on this street, because that man has spent a month telling a country what your life was worth and I would like to be counted as somebody who never did that.”
The porch light was on behind me. I could hear my father moving around upstairs.
“Ask me what I want,” I said.
He blinked. “What?”
“Ask me. You said you’d never ask me for anything I didn’t offer. So ask me what I want. Nobody’s done it in two years.”
“All right.” He straightened up off the car. “Phoebe. What do you want?”
I heard myself find out.
“I want to play on Saturday,” I said. “Not to come back. I want to walk out there in front of a lot of people and be extremely good at something for two hours, and I want to beat you if I can, and then I want to go home and never do it again, and I want that to be allowed to be the end of it without anybody calling it a tragedy.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. That’s my entire ambition.” My voice did something and I let it. “And then I want to go and do the boring, unbelievable, invisible work I actually chose, which is raising my son, and I want to be permitted to have chosen it on purpose.”
Edwardo stood very still.
“Ah,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Because that is not what I am offering you.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t. You’re offering me the tennis.”
He put his hand over his mouth and dragged it down over his jaw, and looked off up the street at the one car with the one man in it, and I have never liked him more than I did right then, because he didn’t argue.
“You take me seriously,” I said. “You’re the only person in the sport who does.
And I have been drinking that down like water for weeks because I was thirsty for it.
” I made myself say the rest of it. “But you take me seriously as a player. And that’s still somebody standing outside my life telling me what the important part of it is. ”
“And your husband?”
“My husband did that in a book.” I folded my arms. “He was wrong, and he was a coward about it, and I don’t know yet what I’m going to do about him. I’m still working that one out.”
Edwardo laughed. It wasn’t a happy noise, but it was real.
“That,” he said, “is the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Do not apologize. It is honest and I asked for it, and I would rather have it than another year of wondering.” He opened the car door and stood in the gap of it. “You are going to lose on Saturday, you know.”
“Actually, I’m going to take your legs off.”
“You are thirty-six and you have not played a point in two years.”
“Deuce court,” I said. “Front foot.”
He winced. Actually winced.
“Your father,” he said, with feeling, “is a menace.”
Then he drove off, and the one car down the road didn’t follow him, because there’s no story in a man leaving.